Congress leaders were hoping that he would be back for the planned agitation on 16 March against amendments to Land Acquisition Bill. While the party was protesting on Delhi streets today, the man in question was found Missing in Action

Why Prateek Kuhad from Delhi is one of those singers who stands out despite the clanging of cutlery at a club and rises above the loud chatter of suits at the bar who have no interest in music whatsoever

Digital India will transform India and democracy through a more effective citizen-government engagement, will usher transparency in governance, take the government to the remotest villages and citizens

It is easy to be taken in by the decorative elegance of Raza’s work. But once you begin to look beyond the formal beauty of his work, you encounter a stubbornly abstract language, refusing to yield its mysteries

Says Laurent Léger, a Charlie Hebdo journalist who survived the attack on the magazine, of his colleagues who were killed to Open contributor SAMANTHA DE BENDERN who finds in today’s France a threat to national symbols

Once a Double Niner, always a Double Niner. So say soldiers of the 99th Field Regiment of the Indian Army, which was awarded the title ‘Sylhet’ for its gallantry in the 1971 War for the liberation of Bangladesh. First raised in Aurangabad as the 99th Mountain Composite Regiment (Towed) on 15 April 1964, it is remembered for its role in obtaining the surrender of Pakistani forces after a 25-day gun battle during the war. As this 20-minute documentary shows, the Double Niners were masters of tactical manoeuvres, a tradition they still try their utmost to uphold.

Alam is the co-founder of the Muslim League, the hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference. Beyond the politics, and the facts of his arrest and his life, and his own agenda, there are stories of ordinary people

The Myth of the IQ Test

The effectiveness of the intelligence quotient (IQ) test that is often used to measure how clever a person is, is nothing more than a myth, according to yet another study. With more than 110, 000 participants, this, though, is the largest online intelligence study on record. It concludes that measuring one’s intelligence by a singular, standardised test is highly misleading.

The study was conducted by a Western University-led research team in London and was published in the journal Neuron. The objective of the study was to understand human intelligence by examining how it relates to brain function and whether it’s a single ‘intelligence factor’ that distinguishes people from one another. Conducted online and open to all throughout the world, the researches asked respondents to complete 12 cognitive tests that tapped memory, planning abilities, reasoning and attention, followed by a survey about their background and lifestyle habits.

The results show that when a wide range of cognitive abilities are explored, the observed variations in performance can only be explained with at least three distinct components: short-term memory, reasoning and a verbal component. According to the researchers, no one component, or IQ, explains everything.

Following up their findings, the scientists scanned the brains of 16 volunteers (known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) while they completed the same tests. They found that the three key types of intelligence relied on different circuits within the brain, challenging the dominant notion that intelligence lies primarily in one region of the brain.

The study also provided a treasure trove of new information on how factors such as age, gender and the tendency to play computer games influence brain functions.

While regular brain training exercises didn’t appear to affect subjects’ general cognitive performance, those who regularly played computer games performed significantly better in reasoning and short-term memory tasks. The researchers, however, point out that the links between the two phenomena are not clear, and more research will be required to understand this.

It is easy to be taken in by the decorative elegance of Raza’s work. But once you begin to look beyond the formal beauty of his work, you encounter a stubbornly abstract language, refusing to yield its mysteries